Hollywood lives by the simple, sad axiom “Where there’s money, there’s more money,” which is how we get remakes of movies that sometimes shouldn’t have been made in the first place, two Spider-Man reboots within five years, and a Star Wars franchise that ensures our children’s children will revere George…
There’s no one right way to show mental illness in the movies, yet there are hundreds of ways to get it wrong. Even though certain disorders come with specific traits, a diagnosis is not a human being, and doomed is the actor who just cycles through symptoms rather than working…
After many high note-saturated years, the long-in-the-tooth American Idol will sign off after this upcoming fifteenth season (premiering in January 2016). But if your dreams of being America’s next golden throat are still red-hot, fear not: AI will kick off auditions for its epic swan song this Friday in Denver, so pour…
Emily Griffith’s story deserved a happier ending. After giving so much to so many — she founded the first free adult-learning institution in the country, the Opportunity School — she retired in 1933 and moved to a cabin up in the mountains. And there the founder of the Emily Griffith…
The upcoming Amy Winehouse documentary Amy is one of the best music docs Village Voice film critic Stephanie Zacharek has ever seen, and she explains why to Voice film editor Alan Scherstuhl and LA Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson this week. Also this week: The confusing (yet really, really enjoyable) explanations…
Perhaps a side effect of Denver’s recent development boom and expansion is that this city may have just become an easy mark for reality television — at least judging from the sudden rash of audition opportunities headed our way. Big Brother, The Bachelor, Jeopardy and Wheel Of Fortune all came…
Five films into the franchise, Terminator: Genisys feels like a VHS cassette that’s been rewound and recorded over for 21 years. Director Alan Taylor (of the unmemorable Thor: The Dark World) gives us images — a thumbs-up, an abandoned factory, a liquid-metal cop smashing through the windshield of a car…
Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 Magic Mike was a tease. The ads tempted audiences with sweaty chests and thrusting crotches, but after Soderbergh lured us into his all-male strip club, he turned on the lights to show us the squalor. His hunks were drugged and morally decayed. The women — the sober…
Despite an evening rain shower, folks of all ages had a roaring good time Tuesday night at the Film on the Rocks screening of Jurassic World, complete with a pre-movie set by the School Of Rock All-Stars. Photographer Brandon Marshall brought back these images of all the prehistoric partying. Now see…
On this week’s Voice Film Club podcast, the LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson and the Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl in New York disagree on just about everything in Ted 2 — except that it has a few very funny moments — but only after revisiting the impressive Inside Out, which is nearly…
Some movies are indefensible, and Ted 2 is one of them. Not only is this a movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear; it’s the sequel to an earlier movie about a libidinous, foul-mouthed stuffed bear. But I laughed and laughed at Ted 2 — as I did at the…
Even if you live in the same city or town your whole life, the place you came from is always a distant country: Old trees are cut down to be replaced, one hopes, by new ones; shops and businesses change ownership or, worse, are torn down; landmarked buildings may stay…
Denver horror film fans, rejoice! Theresa Mercado, your scream queen, is back on her deadly throne and she’s putting her Best of Denver award for Best Bloodthirsty Movie Host to good use by taking her scary Screen Scream series to the Sie FilmCenter, where it will kick off Thursday with a…
The first time we cry, as a newborn, might be the purest emotion we ever feel. We sob — a raw mess of tears and terror — and a big human rushes to give comfort. Mentally, the connection is made: My feelings trigger a response, be it hugs or milk…
No one recognized Rick Famuyiwa when he strolled up to the Ladera Park basketball courts on a bright weekday afternoon. In January, the lanky, 41-year-old director’s new comedy, Dope — a crowd-pleasing high school flick about nerds who dress like Kid ‘N Play, dream of going to Harvard and bash…
Crystal Moselle’s documentary The Wolfpack is a Manhattan fable about fear. Two decades ago, a Hare Krishna conspiracy theorist and self-described god named Oscar Angulo moved from Peru to a public housing tenement on the Lower East Side with his American bride, Susanne, whom he’d met and wooed on the…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways, it’s not new at all. Here’s a dramatic teen comedy, flavor-crystaled with sex and drugs and innocent raunch, about good friends who get caught up in bad business on their way to…
Part of what makes writer-director Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope so fresh and joyous is that in many key ways it’s not new at all. Like Dazed & Confused or The Breakfast Club, this is a film about just how weird the extraordinarily normal kids are — kids like you. The teen…
Forget the Orange Is the New Black bingewatch you’d planned for this week, because your eyes need to stay focused on one of the most ambitious but exciting festivals to come to the Mile High City. SeriesFest: Season One is a brand-new festival coming out of Denver – the birthplace…
Of course a 2015 Joe Dante horror-comedy would be some kind of throwback. The Gremlins director has spent a career idealizing the creature-feature jollies of his youth, jolting audiences with wittily vicious nostalgia. Dante’s goofy monster movies have always been more toothy than their antecedents — more technically accomplished, fully…
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl may not be the best teen-cancer weepie ever made — if there even is a best teen-cancer weepie. But it’s surely the most adorable, for better or worse — less like The Fault in Our Stars and more like Diary of a Wimpy…
For film fanatics, it boggles the mind that a generation of movie-watchers have no idea what seeing cinema on 35mm film is like. The phasing out of this grand format, along with the slow death of the repertory movie house, is the focus of Julia Marchese’s documentary Out Of Print,…
